Sarah Thornton, in the cogent and impressively resilient third chapter of her book, Club Cultures: Music, Media & Subcultural Capita, thoroughly problematizes the concept of the "mainstream". In contrast to what she derides as the obfuscation of " a loaded colloquialism like the 'mainstream with academic arguments," (Thorton 92), Thornton seeks to deconstruct this reductive relationship between the mainstream and the opposition that subcultures have traditionally offered to it. Her methodology has two pillars, principally sociological analysis, including a notable reliance on Pierre Bourdieu, and the experience of a direct ethnography of UK club culture. Her ultimate conclusion is to reject this dichotomy for the way it ignores the impact of social structure, and normative commitments, on a subcultural group's thinking
Discussion Questions:
Thornton, beyond establishing the segregation of clubs and their itinerant subcultures along lines of culture, sexual orientation, and race, goes even further to employ Bourdieu's assertion that the emphasis on subculture itself is a manifestation of the eagerness of "bourgeois adolescents" to establish with respect to their bourgeois setting a "refusal of complicity whose most refined expression is a propensity towards aesthetics aestheticism' " (Bourdieu 1984:55). My question is duo-fold:
1. Is it possible to interpret this aforementioned bourgeois tendency as a more intellectually legitimate normative re-imagination of these youths' attitudes toward culture, rather than emblematic of the existing order?
2. Having accepted the aforementioned assertion, and used it to map subcultural allegiance on a socio-economic plain, is it still possible to transcend this architecture to suggest an objective criterion for judging musical preference?
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